I used to use sticky back stabilizer exclusively, because I could not stand when the embroidery shifted and the Celtic knots did not line up. About a year ago, though, I got over myself mainly because the number of thread breaks and the slow stitch speed had finally driven me nuts. Now, I hoop my stabilizer and use temporary adhesive spray.

Since I float all of my fabrics, when it is important I first stitch out a placement cross onto the stabilizer. This same cross has been drawn in chalk on the back of my fabric. I then lightly spray the temporary adhesive onto the stabilizer.

After I line up the cross on the back of the fabric with the stitched lines on the stabilizer, I run a basting box around the area to be embroidered. Then, an outline of the applique area is stitched. (I have digitized all of these lines into my embroidery file.)

Next, I spray the stabilized applique fabric with the temporary adhesive so it will not shift on the base fabric…

…and then lay it over the applique area, making sure to check that the area is covered.

Now, I run double lines to tack down the fabric.

Here’s a closer look at the double lines. Why double? I have found that the two lines keep the fabric from fraying (even if the outside line gets clipped here and there) and then pulling away from underneath the covering satin stitch line. Because there are 2 lines, I can trim as close as possible so I can avoid any fuzzies showing.

Trimmed.

Finished and ready to be cut out.

Sometimes, when both fabrics are thick, I might lay the applique first, and then after tackdown of the “base” fabric, trim the larger piece of fabric away from the area, but I always worry that the 2 fabrics might pull apart. I tend to do the above as often as possible.

(The author of this post, Paddy Kelleher, has graciously allowed me to post this tutorial which is fantastic. Thank you, Paddy!)

For this embroidery I consulted the talented Summerset. She uses a lot of lattice in her wearable art pieces so I asked for some advice, which she graciously provided.

Lattice satin stitch all-over embroidery

The pattern is on left. On the right is a tracing on reverse on right. Again I have used a satin fused with cotton interfacing for the base, with the upper fabric in a cotton velvet. The darts are marked on the bodice and thread traced through all layers.

I sewed on the pink applique at neckline to have an end point for the embroidery. Sometimes you end up with a gap otherwise. The straight stitching lines follow the grid. This stablizes the layers and shows where to stitch.

Keeping the line straight to do the stitching was a challenge for me. I wanted to stitch at an angle. I also found it better to stitch over the straight line with the line being just covered at one side by the stitching. If I tried to centre it I got crooked.

I did not go through the dart area because I wanted to do as much as possible in the flat. I left one square blank on the side of the dart and then finished the stitching once the darts were sewn. The stitching in flat nearly completed. I kept missing areas and would have to go back to them.

The darts are sewn, the fused satin was trimmed away and the dart was catchstitched open.

Dart is sewn and the gap in embroideryshows. It looks like my lines match up-Yay!

Stitching complete, but the bodice hasn’t been trimmed to size yet. This dress is still in production, so I will get some pictures up once it has been completed.

(Ya know when you suddenly feel as if you have never spelled a word before, so you look it up, are surprised by the spelling, and are sure you have been spelling it wrong all your life?! Having issues with “camouflage” this morning…now singing “kamooflayge” as a mantra…I know, now I am saying it wrong, but I will know how to spell it for the rest of my life.)

A mom wrote to me as she begins working on her young dancing daughter’s first solo dress. The little one is thicker around the middle. Since I have some experience with that because of my oldest diva, I told her I would write about how I dealt with it…and since I have been digitizing ’til I am dreaming about creating food out of embroidery stitches in my sleep, I figured a little writing break was in order. I am by no means an expert in dealing with this figure (I just slap a shapeless shirt on my own [say that 10 times fast: slap a shapeless shirt, shlap a slapesesh shirt, shap a shapish sh…]), but I have a couple of dresses under my belt and perhaps some readers will offer their own experiences and suggestions as well.

We all know that there are certain silhouettes that look good on different body types. There are certain silhouettes that certain body shapes shy away from. Some people wear whatever they want, whenever they want, whether they should or not, and I say more power to ’em! But Irish dance, not unlike other dance forms, does dictate a certain dress “look.” I was glad when the teeny-tiny bodice on top of the gigantoid skirt became a thing of the past as it was a rare child of any shape who looked good in that. Don’t really know why, but the wide skirts always reminded me of the Flying Nun… and I always felt I was looking at a costume that would fit right in with this group below –

Am I right? Ever hear of “The Triadic Ballet,” Bauhaus, or Oscar Schlemmer? More info here if you are curious: Bauhaus

That overwhelmingly wide, stiff triangle look was particularly unforgiving when it was under a thicker torso. It was a good thing when the waists started to drop, and even better when the skirts began to narrow. Now we are seeing some extreme dropped waistlines…nothing better for making all but the skinniest minnies look like sausage tubes (brings back horrid anorexia-inducing memories of college and gray unitards and clanging gongs and a hippie choreographer who never came to rehearsal with her feet on the ground, if you get my drift…)……..deep sigh.

There is a freaking point here somewhere…

…yes, kamooflayging thicker torsos to create an attractive balanced look for the incredibly logical creation that is an Irish dance dress.

There is always the usual use of dark colors over all, as well as using darker colors strategically so that brighter colors can pull focus. There was a time when it was de riguer for ID dresses to have a bright color down the center of the dress while the bodice and skirt sides were darker. Those were passing when I started with my girls in ID. You do see some of that still but it is not as stark a use of contrasting colors as it used to be.

So, off to the fabric store you go. You want a color that complements your dancer’s coloring, obviously, but make life a bit simpler for yourself by letting the dancer loose to be drawn to the colors she likes. It is rare that a dancer (or anybody, for that matter) will claim as their favorite a color that looks bad on them. You may not like it, but hold it up under your dancer’s face to see what happens. It will probably work beautifully.

A few years ago, I brought a whole box of fabric to begin working with a 10 year-old. Susan had given me all sorts of things that I loved as well as some that made me cringe. This red-cheeked, slightly sallow little dancer went straight for this bright coral metallic silk that set my teeth on edge. I knew she had to be wrong, but when we held it up, her complexion brightened, her red cheeks turned pink, and her eyes sparkled! This is the dress:

I have since always trusted the dancer.

In my diva’s case she chose plum. She was young yet, but we both wanted something a bit more understated than the bright flourescent colors that were still the rage at the time, so no dramatic color shifts for us. This is her first dress (I just realized that we were a bit ahead of out time! Applique was still what everyone was doing, but we did just embroidery!):

Now, it is rather subtle, but you can see that the center of the bodice and the center front skirt are lighter than the sides and the sleeves. There is a black sparkly overlay over the darker parts. In the sunlight in that pic it is not as pronounced a difference as it really was. The design also worked to draw the eye in…you can’t see the top of the cfp but the design comes to a point like the bodice design.

The diva’s next dress was a bit more dramatic.

This time we made more of an effort to draw the eye in by using black on the bodice & skirt sides and by making the bodice point down the center along with the long tapering design. In fact the black was so successful that it looks as if the bodice is standing away from the offset skirt waist. It is a 2 piece, but the bodice fit snugly so there was no space at the waist between the bodice hem and the skirt. The long straight lines of crystals also help draw the eye in.

I did make this skirt very offset which means the “sides” of the dress were more than 2 inches forward of the diva’s actual side. This again tricks the eye into interpreting the front waist into a narrower width.

The longer, dropped, pointed bodice look is another tried and true device for altering the look of a thicker torso. I wrote about making the pointed bodice here: Bodice/Jacket for 2-piece. At the time that I made the dresses in that post, those were drop-waisted jackets…compared to now, they are high waisted, but I would make the same pattern alterations with a longer waist. I know many people feel that the 2-piece dress makes dancers look thick. I do not agree, because, in fact, there is no difference in the bulk of fabric that is in the waist area or at the point of bodice & skirt overlap. There may be even less because there is no bodice/jacket fabric in the waist seam at all (just a single layer of cotton for the under-bodice). The problem in the look comes when the bodice is poorly fitted so that it looks too big on the dancer or it cannot sit down far enough over the skirt. I have never been a fan of the faux bodice point that is appliqued onto the skirt as I find the actual waist seam to be very obvious, which is why I like the 2 piece plus the fact the jacket can be removed in between dances to alleviate the sweat factor. (That being said, I am working on an OTR with Susan and she wants to incorporate that faux point…I have to learn to never say never because it always comes back to bite me in the…)

Another trick is to direct the eye upward to the face by creating interest above the bust line. You can do this with a collar design and/or a corset bodice look. I wrote about my approach to the corset bodice here: corset-style bodice .

And that brings me to the design itself. As I just wrote above, you can keep the eye away from the torso by keeping your embellishments above the bust line. Another technique is to make sure that any design that comes down below the bust is thin or tapered…anything wide will just accent the dancer’s width.

Ultimately, I am a big believer in making the dress that the dancer wants, making the dress that makes the dancer feel like a spectacular princess. When she feels beautiful, she dances beautifully. Over the course of my life as a performer, I had to wear some pretty awful & humiliating things because someone (choreographer, director, costume designer) forgot that embarrassing the dancers meant they would not dance their best…we tried, but when you feel like a stuffed gray sausage you tend to dance like one!

There is a new thread on Celtic Flame about stealing designs. A dressmaking mom writes that another mom in her school told her she was wasting her time coming up with her own designs because there was so much to COPY on the internet. When she first wrote, she alluded to a website that sells embroidery, so I wondered if she might be talking about Taoknitter Arts.

An answer that she just posted to another reply makes me think she is talking about my website.

Big sigh.

Susan and I have hashed out the pitfalls of posting clear pics of the designs since I started. She has dealt with this issue far longer than I have, and I respect her viewpoint, her advice and her experience. I will not bore you, or myself, by re-visiting the mental gymnastics (complete with teeth gnashing) that helped me arrive at the current presentation of the designs on my website. If you look at it, I think you get it.

But, I do want to say that I know I take the risk of people copying things. I have this tendency to believe that all folks are inherently honest and honorable. I do, routinely, get blind-sided by self-serving idiots with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and I sometimes finally get really irked by stupidity and mean-spiritedness, but I have yet to see a change in my basic trust. I now know what it sounds like when Susan shakes her head at me over the phone.

It would make me crazy to try to police things or try to find a more complicated way of managing the designs. But let me be clear, copying a design is stealing and I am not shy about approaching the thief and making it public if I have to. I did, by accident, see an exact copy of a dress I made for my daughter. Susan designed it for us. The design was never made available, but there it was, perfectly copied on someone else’s dress. When I contacted the overseas dressmaker, she was great about it, very sorry, and told me that the design had been given to her by the dancer.

I get contacted rather often by dancers who send me pics of designs from other dresses, even BN dresses, wanting THAT design digitized. Sometimes I get a design “created by the dancer” only to be led by the dressmaking gods to pics of the EXACT design on a finished dress…that blows my mind. Once I explain that I will not copy because it is both unethical and illegal, they usually calmly explain that they did not know that and we go forward. Only once did I not hear back after my refusal…I think that was embarrassment.

I do think most folks either do not know or really do not think about it. One poster on CF wrote: ” I think the problem is that most people don’t equate “appropriating” someone’s design as stealing because they don’t physically take something. It isn’t like shoplifting where you actually take something in your hand.

It’s more like cheating on a test.

Ask your friend if she encourages her dd to copy her neighbor’s answers on exams in school. Why not? It is just what she did. She used someone else’s work and passed it off as her own.

Ask her if she’s going to brag about how she aquired her designs – Wow look what I copied off of the internet and I didn’t have to pay for it! If someone asks her where the design came from, is she going to say “Oh I digitized it myself” or something equally evasive. If she’s so proud of her cleverness, why not tell all?

Ask her if she thinks the TC will be happy if she finds out the design was lifted. Is she OK with her school being known as the one where it is OK to rip off other people’s dresses?”

Interesting viewpoint.

Susan made me laugh when she pointed out that truly, the only thing I should worry about is if someone else’s poorly digitized “copy” was thought to be mine! Now that would be a drag!

There was also a point made by someone about using designs from a site on the internet. She wrote: “While there are a couple of sites out there that have drawn up several dress designs specifically for irish dancing use, you have to remember then, that your dress won’t be an original. Chances of running into another dancer with the same pattern are slim but just something to keep in mind. “

That mind set has never occurred to me!! Yes, yes, I know that the conversation about whether or not a BN dress is really custom when they re-use designs in part or in whole pops up routinely. But, it has always been my assumption that each dressmaker brings a totally different perspective to making a dress and so it will be rare that 2 dressmakers will use the same design the same way let alone the same fabrics. In fact, what I love about my clients is that they always do something I did not envision. Very often, they ask me to modify the designs by taking something out, putting something else in, taking it apart or trying something new with a piece of something else! I love it.

Still, I guess that is a concern for some people. I appreciate that. And I also thoroughly appreciate my creative dressmaking clients. Thank you for spurring me on!

I thought that the above might have been a rant…I guess it was just a bit of mental popcorn…

…that we should try having the dancers perform with bags over their heads…Molly (one of our members) wrote: “I loved a male adjudicator’s comment once that he would like it if each dancer wore a plain garment with a bag over the head so he couldn’t even see a face. Then he would be judging only the dancing!”

While I was eating my lunch, I perused the New York Times. I found these:

Hey! No wigs!!! Next we can get into the most outrageously shaped and colored headpieces!!! Shamrocks! Knots! Celtic crosses! A can of Guinness!!

Susan wrote a bit to answer Caroline specifically, but others have asked similar questions:

Hi Caroline, I used the FeisDress pattern bodice as the block from which this tunic was developed. But changes that I made to it were dictated by the bodies of the dancers whom I was fitting. Some changes were pretty general but others were very specific.

Dana’s tunic with 4 panels across the front was a much easier pattern to develop than Liz’s with 5 panels across the front.

It would be a very challenging pattern for the panels to come all the way to the hem. Additional seams would probably be required and it wouldn’t work on all fabrics. I’m amazed and very please how beautifully Liz’s tunic worked out with the striped fabric. I was afraid the design would require a fabric without an obvious design.

The tunics we chose to make all have a puffy-all-the-way-around skirt. In the process I did come up with a tunic pattern that would create a “flat” front, which we may make up for the right customer.

Ann will have to give you her story on construction difficulty. Remember, these were first-time-inventing the wheel dresses with a learning curve. I think when she can mentally take out the embroidery issues, she’ll say the tunic is easier to construct than the waist-seam dress. But a precise pattern is the key to easy construction of anything.

Susan

My two cents: Yes, minus the embroidery (which is no different in terms of time, prep, and creation), these tunics are so much easier than the traditional dress, but as Susan said, the key was a precisely designed pattern made to each dancers’ specific measurements. As I stated in the last post, when Liz’s pattern had to be altered, the ENTIRE pattern had to be altered, parts and angles and panels re-drawn, etc, etc, etc! (Parts and angles and panels, Oh MY!…sorry…I heard Dorothy and the Tin Man in my head…)

And that being said, the black and pink dress took just as much time as a waist seam dress because of the attachment issues for the pink panels (the pink panels are attached to the black bodice). I am glad I did it the way I did…Liz’s mom Paula saw Dana dance and said that it moved beautifully. But if I do this type of tunic again, I may have to explore some of the other attachment ideas that are rolling around in my head now.

Folks are asking if this is a pattern that will be available. That is not feasible. These two patterns were made specifically for each dancer, and as dressmakers know, no 2 dancers are built alike. Creating a generic pattern really cannot be done as they cannot be altered easily…watching Susan alter the pattern for Liz was an education and brought home to me how specifically she tailored each pattern to each body.

After I posted the above, Mary Clare wrote:

Hi! Lovely work with this design. I was wondering in which are of the tunic that the specific fitting issues evolved. It seems to me that the bodice fit issues would be much the same as a “regular” dress but the fit issues would evolve below the waist. Am I correct? I realize that the seamstress would not have to deal with the challenge of the jacket fitting over a skirt that takes a sharp angled turn but that seems to make the job easier in my mind. The panel hang problems seem to disappear with this style too! I am terribly impressed with your talent!

And Susan again clarified:

(The issues evolved in) Both of them, although Paula was referring specifically to the red dress. Ann didn’t get to watch me mess with Dana’s pattern.

If you change the bust line the darts change and the angles change. If you change the waist all the darts have to be moved and balanced and again the angles and panels change. If you change the length of the panels the darts may have to be adjusted and the angles change. It is a juggling act. Ann’s right, a straightforward fitting adjustment may trickle down and cause the entire bodice to be redrawn.

The dress looks really simple but the pattern isn’t simple to make fit, at least not with the way I wanted the skirt to fall. The “hang issue” only disappears because the pattern was engineered with a specific hang built into it.

Right! Have to say that when we began I imagined that in one respect this would be an easier pattern to use because of the lack of a waist seam which meant I did not have to deal with the physics of the skirt hang. However, I knew that engineering the pattern so that the panel hang was already incorporated was going to take some figuring…and I was glad it was not me who was figuring it out! We had one hang issue that was only evident once the a bodice was made…Susan fixed it and a new bodice was then cut and constructed.

So, no, I did “not have to deal with the challenge of the jacket fitting over a skirt that takes a sharp angled turn,” but I did not expect to. I had a different challenge to make this tunic fit beautifully over a different skirt with an evolving silhouette.

On a couple of boards, a few folks made comments that they “saw the dresses in pics” and that they were not flattering, making the girls look thick. #1, where are the pics? I would like to see these…as the SRO pics are not out and these dresses are new, I doubt there are any that I have not seen…and #2, these dresses have much less under them than the traditional stiff skirts which means they fit more closely and look great on their figures. The tendency to jump to a conclusion with no actual info really irks the hell out of me as does the negation with no clarification. I actually got a big kick and a laugh out of the comment on one of the boards that the tunics looked like Renaissance armor! At least that was specific!!!

Others of you have asked some specific questions about the potential uses for this pattern…please excuse me if I take a few days to ponder this. I did not get my usual recovery time this weekend and am now fighting major brain and body malfunctions. Great comments that I thank you all for and great questions to ponder.

I was planning on writing more about our new tunic dresses (Liz’s Tunic Dress, Dana’s Tunic Dress), but Caroline posted a bunch of questions before I got to it! So I will use her list as my framework:

I love it! And BOY do I have questions!
You have again revolutionized the concept of an Irish dance dress…

So here goes,

How did you attach the pink panels? Are the black panels part of the bodice? How can I adapt Susan’s pattern to do this? Will Susan make a special pattern for this and where can I buy it?
How did you stiffen the panels? (Did you stiffen the panels? ) How did you work out the lining for the black panels? Is the underskirt secure? Is there any Velcro or other form of attachment to keep the bodice and skirt in their place?
At what stage of the bodice did you embroider the panels? Do you have to embroider around the edges of the panels when the darts of the bodice were already in place?

I am sure I can think of more questions, but let’s keep it with these for now

Love,
Caroline

Let’s start with the bodices. The black and red panels are cut as part of the bodices…there are NO horizontal waist seams!

Susan put her mathematical mind to work to create a custom bodice for each dancer. The obvious challenge was to incorporate not only the appropriate darts and seam angles but also the angles and lengths of the panels themselves! When she brought the first test pattern to me so we could look at it on the dress dummy, I was amazed by both its complexity and its brilliant simplicity. Together we worked through a couple of things, but I served mainly as her sounding board… amazing, Susan!!

This pattern was not an alteration of the Feisdress pattern. Each bodice was specifically created to fit two very different bodies. I cannot imagine that this could be generated as a generic pattern…alterations would change it drastically and mess up the panels and their angles of hang. We did have to alter the pattern for the red dress…I just stood there in awe as I watched what Susan did to it to make it right. Not an easy task. Later, I was able to make another SIMPLE alteration, but only because I had worked through it with her once before.

If you want a custom pattern, you will have to contact Susan.

Attaching the pink panels was not as simple an operation as I thought it would be.

I had many ideas…many moments in the middle of the night when I would pop awake with the “solution.” But I could do nothing until all of the pink panels were finished…11 of them…the never-ending panels……… Yes, the pink panels are stiffened. The design was embroidered first, then I attached it to 1 layer of firmflex, attached a back lining, and satin stitched the outside of each panel. Then I began fooling around with attaching them. We wanted a narrow silhouette (no panels sticking straight out to the side), and we wanted them to move freely. I was thinking that minimal attachment would be best, but then they hung at odd angles. I ended up sewing the pink to the black across the top of each pink panel and the again down about 1 inch on each side of the black where it splits at the top of the pink panels. Deciding on the width of that opening was a journey of trial and error.

The designs on the panels of the red dress and the black bodice were all done after the bodice was cut but before any construction was done. I serged the lining to the black bodice as I always do, completed the satin stitching around the panels, then completed the bodice darts. For the red bodice, I did a partial bag lining so that the darts would not become stiff simply because of the amount of fabric in them. The lining was serged to the bodice around the edges. Then, again, I completed the satin stitching, followed by the darts. Both tunics have separating zippers.

There is only decorbond in the shorter panels of each bodice. Keeping them soft, especially on the red dress, was a priority. In fact, there is no firmflex (like timtex) in the entire red dress! WOO-HOO!!!

Now, the underskirts…felt like I invented a wheel. Thought this would be a piece of cake…not. But, each of these skirts was a good challenge.

I decided that Dana’s skirt should be a drop waist so that there would be no extra bulk under the black tunic. The attachment of the skirt fabric to the skirt yoke evolved. My original thought (and attachment) was still too bulky, so this ended up working. Here’s the top black layer (and the mysterious cat tail!)…

…and the next poofy layer which I thought would be enough.
But when the pink panels were attached to the bodice, it was obvious that we needed another layer of poof to resist the panel weight. So, I added the silver. You can see here how soft everything is.

This skirt is on a stretchy yoke with an elastic waist.

The red skirt is totally different. I forgot to take pics of it (walking dead), but here is a pic from the O as it was waiting to be worn…

This skirt has 2 very gathered layers attached to a wide elastic band. There is a short zipper in the back. Finding just the right poofiness (love that technical term) is the reason for all of the “quilting” below the waist band.

At a fitting, young Liz said she loved the way this skirt felt because it is so light!

The tunics are made to simply be worn over the skirts. There is nothing to attach the tunic to the skirt because they fit well and there is no centering to worry about. If I needed attachments to keep things in place, well then I would not have done a very good job of fitting!